“Eat your parents” urges Swift in “demographic bomb” re-write.

It was a classic satirical view, almost as relevant now as it was nearly three hundred years ago, when “Swiftie09” as he called himself then, posted it on Ye Newsmorsel. Eat your children. Now Jonathan Swift, still in the satire game despite his age, has decided to rewrite it, performing a neat “flip” on the original idea. The young today should kill and eat their parents. Food on the table now, and worries about having to care for them later abolished. “It is killing two birds with one stone, said Swift. “Especially apt, metaphorically, if you have two parents.”

“The child-eating idea was right for famine-struck Ireland three hundred years ago,” the 345 year old humourist said from his home in Cork. “Now, we see a similar disaster upon the horizon. Soon, there will be millions of older folk making huge demands and contributing nothing. And at this very moment we have a growing economic crisis, with many young families barely able to put food on the table, with e’en a pasty taxed by the young Tories”

Swift famously wrote in his Modest Proposal that that a young child can be “a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled” But what of a parent in his or her mid fifties – won’t they be less toothsome?

“It is verily a flaw in the argument, I will admit. That is where young Mr Jamie Oliver comes in. I have observed he has a reforming zeal in both matters of the kitchen table and the schoolroom desk. I urge him to kill his parent and prepare him or her, upon the television, in such a manner as to demonstrate the benefits, both to the private palate and the public purse”

Mr Swift admitted he was in talks with an unnamed producer to turn his idea into a movie. “It is to be a fiction of science,” he said. “Though I know not what that means, exactly.”